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“Let me help, Wehna.”

“Wait—”

Arvo dashes after a ring that bounced across the street before I can stop him, right into the path of two large oxen being driven mercilessly by a sneer-faced man.

The scene slows strangely as I envision his tiny body being trampled by the huge animals. Even if I could unglue myself from the ground, I wouldn’t have enough time to get to him. A scream tears through me, cuts my vocal cords to shreds.

At the last moment, a strong hand grabs him by the scruff of his shirt and hauls him to the side. Arvo yelps as he is plucked out of harm’s way. The livestock and the wagon rumble by, and I lay a hand to my heart and breathe a prayer of thanks to Elyon.

Arvo’s rescuer crouches down in front of him, hands firmly clamped around his forearms. My heart, which is already racing, picks up pace. But when the man looks my way, I want to cry with relief. It’s my father’s friend, Bryn.

With a pat to his back, Arvo scurries across the street. I stand in time for him to throw himself into my side.

“Hey, you’re alright,” I say when I feel him shaking.

He says nothing, choosing to bury his face in the folds of my dress instead.

Bryn crosses over to our side and inspects our fallen cart. “Nothing appears to be broken,” he says as he rights it.

I shake my head, brushing my hair away from my face. “Thank you.” I don’t mean to whisper the words.

When he merely pauses to throw me a smile before setting to work gathering the jewelry, I wake up.

“Here.” I lead Arvo to a wobbly stool outside a bustling tavern—not my first choice, but I need to keep him close and stationary. “You sit here while I clean this up. Then we’ll go home and have a drop of honey with the cakes I made for dinner. Deal?” I gently press a finger to his button nose.

He sniffs and runs his hand under it. “Deal.”

I straighten and return to the task. Bryn has already begun placing the items in the narrow drawers that line the merchant side of the booth. Pada’s clever craftsmanship.

“Thank you,” I murmur, stooping to snag a long necklace with a glowing soapstone pendant in the shape of a rosebud—one of Mada’s more delicate carvings.

“These are really remarkable.” Bryn hands me a pair of identical earrings, watching me as I deposit them in the appropriate drawer. “How did your parents manage to make them shine like that?”

My eyes dart to him for a few seconds, and his kindness makes me feel filthy. Every time, this lie gets more difficult to tell. The words tumble past my lips.

“They use bolétis. There are many more varieties of them in the forest, if you know where to look.”

A curious expression crosses his face—a half-smile and a raised eyebrow. I can’t interpret it. “Is that so?”

It almost sounds like he finds something amusing.

I nod and grab another bracelet—this one with simple spherical beads. Their light is barely visible anymore. It was already a weak thing, but now that Utsanek is lit with shards of sola brossa in every major place, they seem almost worthless. Probably why no one wants to buy them anymore.

He goes back to gathering the jewelry, and I am glad I’m no longer his object of interest.

I look over my shoulder and find Arvo still on his stool, pressing his nose up to the window of the tavern.

“You’ve had no word from your parents, I take it.”

Bryn’s deep voice draws me back. A heaviness tugs at my heart, and I bite my cheek to remain in control.

“No.”

They left in a hurry that night, promising Arvo they’d be back as soon as they could. He believed them—they had done it before countless times. But he didn’t know about the kaligorven, about how they were on the prowl again. He had no reason to doubt their ability to keep themselves safe.

Just once, I wished they would have bothered to make such promises to me. They always thought I didn’t need them. For one moment more, I wished they would have treated me as the needy child and not the competent seventeen-year-old. Did they know how hard it was to see them go, again and again, whether for a good cause or not? Did they realize how quickly the responsibility drained me, or how much more difficult I found it to battle my incessant fears when they weren’t there? I wished they could’ve seen how I needed them as much as the countless hurting souls they ministered to without fail.

Bryn is silent for a while as I organize the items into drawers, trapped in a labyrinth of thought. People mill all around us, moving from one point of business to another, conversing and getting worked up about things that don’t matter. They are heedless of the two statues in the middle of the commotion, or of how pointless all their strivings really are.